


(noun) thing created

by nellywrites



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Related, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Coming of Age, F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, Identity, POV Second Person, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 10:38:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6701512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nellywrites/pseuds/nellywrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mystique had slowly grown like a callus over the places Raven inhabited until she was all roughness and death. It was impossible to reduce that to one moment, when it had been the amalgamation of all of them. But if she were forced to point out the day Raven died, she'd say it was the cool Bavarian morning when Raven had swaddled her newborn son in his dead father’s coat and left him behind in the depths of the Black Forest. An introspective character piece that explores the emotional journey of Raven's transformation into Mystique, in the years between First Class and Days of Future Past. Gap filler fic, mostly canon compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Creature

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [X-Men Big Bang](http://http://xmenbigbang.livejournal.com/) 2016\. Thank you so much to Arisu for the beautiful illustrations that accompany this story. I've embbed them in the story, but please go to her [tumblr](http://arisupaints.tumblr.com/post/143655653675) and give her love. They are truly gorgeous.  
> This is my first time writing in this fandom, so I'm excited to share this with you. I started writing what eventually became this story right after DOFP came out in theaters. It seems fitting I would finish it now. This is mostly canon compliant, but I took liberties with the timeline, in true X-Men fashion. I hope you enjoy it.

_"I don’t know_

_what I will be or what I should call the thing_

_I am,_

_but I know what I used to be."_

 

                          — Linda Gregerson

 

* * *

 

 

It is remarkably easy for a life to become condemned. Mystique, in particular, understood this. Their mistakes—and they were myriad— were not lost on her. When you can be anyone, go anywhere at the speed of thought, life has a way of making you feel invincible. In truth, it only takes a moment for the threads holding your life together to unravel:

 

First, you lose your people. Then your lover. Your family. Then you find yourself somewhere unfamiliar, where you are a complete unknown. Where you possess nothing, and you discover that having nothing to lose is a lot like having nothing at all. (Except that’s not entirely true; there is something to lose, even at this point, something huge to lose, and that is why the unknowable, wandering state never felt like freedom.) Bit by bit you take away your history until you lose your name, your face. And, if nobody knows who you are, do you continue to exist at all?

 

||

 

In the beginning, in the aftermath of that first unraveling in the fall of 1962, when Mystique is still Raven, the idea of going underground and eschewing all she knows feels exciting. Almost like an adventure. She’s the new kid in the group now, struggling to find footing, still so sheltered in the ways of the world. She wants, more than anything, to prove to them and herself that she is capable and strong. That Charles' love hasn't smothered her into uselessness. October 1962, Raven Darkholme thrusts herself headfirst into Magneto’s mission, a willing pupil. An empty vessel waiting to contain.

When they vanish from the shores of Cuba—quite literally vanish— the teleporter who calls himself Azazel drops them all off in a place Raven can't recognize, so alien to anything she has seen before. There is ice and snow as far as her gifted eyes can see; grey skies so vast, capable of evanescing all vanishing points, making a zero of the world. And at night a stillness that could hurt your ears with listening to the echoes of doubts in your head. Erik hides away for days, nursing what Mystique now knows was his grief and Raven is left to flounder alone in this place she isn't quite sure she belongs in. To contemplate if she’s just made the biggest mistake of her life. She wants to yell at him, to recriminate.

 

>   
>  _You don't have a monopoly on suffering._  
>  _You're not the only one who's lost something._  
>  _Tell me what to do, god dammit._

Erik resurfaces clothed in new armor; a captain ready to lead his soldiers into war. Privately, Raven thinks he looks ridiculous in the cape and the imposing helmet. Does he think that by adorning it, turning it into a costume piece, he can forget why it's there in the first place, what it meant when he first put it on?

 _This isn’t a game_ , she wants to say.

 

There were times, those first days, when you still doubted, when your love for Charles and for Hank felt like a weakness, and you looked over at Erik-- at Magneto-- and wondered if he even knew what he was doing. And you felt chilled with the fear that you had placed your faith in yet another man who would ultimately disappoint you.

Magneto had had no real plans of action then, just a lot of speeches. He drilled it all into your heads, every day: identification, apprehension, elimination. Again. Identification, apprehension, elimination. Again and again, until the fear of possibility turned into preemptive anger. And the nefarious future Magneto spoke of became alive in your mind. Magneto's anger was pure and beautiful. You were drawn to it, even if it scared you. You understood, even then, that his passion would be his undoing.

  
He made you nervous in that way that tickled at the place you used to keep for Charles. God, you were so stupid back then, with hearts in your eyes and animus beneath your heart. And when you looked at him standing so righteous and strong, you wanted to give him the world.

 

 

||

  
When you gave yourself the name Mystique you were wearing Raven’s face. You’d been _playing_ at being someone else, the same way you shifted your physical form as a party trick. So you take a nom de guerre. A somewhat ridiculous notion, sure, for those with the privilege of being born ordinary. But all cultures have naming ceremonies. You have a given name, but then you get a chosen name. They tell you who you are, and then you decide who you are.

  
When you locked Raven away, you had hoped the transformation would carry on inwards. And though you are always naked now, and blue, and nobody calls you Raven, when you look in the mirror you still see the same scared, fractured girl you always were.

 

 

 

 

||

  
The first thing you discover in your career as a terrorist is that adrenaline rushes are a drug. And like all highs, a taste is never enough and you will chase that feeling over and over, never to be satiated.

Murder is no different, even if experienced second hand.

You get your first taste of it the day The Brotherhood of Mutants breaks Emma Frost out of CIA headquarters. Your first act of resistance. The proudest moment of your life: the first time you go out in public in all your blue and naked glory.

  
Azazel drops the guards on the courtyard with the kind of ruthless violence he excels at. And then you make your entrance. Magneto at the helm, you on his right side. Two agents guard Frost’s cell and Magneto and Azazel dispose of them thoughtlessly and, for a moment, you are horrified. The plea ‘but they didn’t do anything wrong’ chokes up in the base of Raven’s throat, but you tamp it down. You recognize them, know their names. You doubt they remember yous, though.

You make eye contact with one of them. The one who called Sean a freak. He’s not mouthing off now. He is laying in the ground, slick hands grabbing uselessly at his throat. He's bleeding out fast. He'll be dead within minutes. There is a plea in his eyes. Does he recognize you? You don't know. You don't care. You recall the fear and disdain with which these humans had regarded you only a few months ago. You watch the life drain from his eyes, and you feel a rush of energy.

Power.

 

You can’t remember a time Raven wasn’t afraid, but propelled by the momentum and the possibilities of the revolution Magneto promises, it is easy to forget fear. For the first time in your life, you have choices. Purpose.

 

||

  
Emma Frost is the most terrifying person Raven has ever met. The worst part is, Emma knows it. Mystique keeps her at arm's length and studies her from afar-- her mannerisms, her tells-- just the way Magneto taught her, but Emma remains as impenetrable as her diamond skin.

Emma's ability makes her an invaluable asset to their mission, unhindered as it is by any of Charles' moral limitations. But most importantly, she also brings names, places and precious access to resources, like Sebastian Shaw’s hidden money. Most importantly, she provides Magneto with a game plan. Namely, Project: Wideawake. The covert CIA task force formed in the wake of their involvement with Division X and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Its official mission is research and identification. But they know better than that.

 

> _Identification. That's how it starts._

 

Emma’s knowledge single-handedly propels the fight forward, tipping the scales in their favor. Still, Mystique doesn't trust her. Emma isn’t like them, and Mystique can't trust that Emma is in the fight for anyone but herself. And some days Mystique thinks maybe that isn't such a bad thing.

 

Cut the crap. You didn't like her. And you can tell yourself it's because you didn't trust she wouldn't double-cross you. But you were jealous of her and nervous she'd usurp your place as Magneto’s right hand. She gave him things you never could. You were afraid of her, like you were afraid of Charles. The difference is that you knew a promise would never keep Frost out of your mind. She looked at you like she couldn't wait to break through and spill all of Raven's secrets.

 

||

  
Frost turns out to be a catalyst for Mystique, too. In the midst of preparations for war, she realizes she might be the weakest member of the team. These mutants have spent years perfecting and embracing their powers. Raven has spent all her life pretending. So her mind isn't the only thing Mystique trains. Erik was right. When she stops trying so hard to look human, her muscles start responding to her efforts in new ways. It’s not long until she becomes the best The Brotherhood has at hand to hand combat. She is quick, agile, efficient. Ruthless, is what Azazel proudly calls her. And under Magneto’s encouragement and Azazel’s silent but effective tutelage, Mystique blooms.

 

 

||

  
For months after Cuba it’s the silence which haunts her most. Th _e_ silence inside her head:

 

> _Has he tried? Why hasn't he tried? Does he care? Is he dead?_

  
And the silence outside. Every morning she wakes up and asks, is today the day when the world finds out about mutants? She waits for the panic, for the incendiary cries. But there is only silence. She isn't sure how to feel about that.

 

||

  
You call him Erik, once, by reflex, and he turns, fixes you with a cold, steely glare that makes your skin prickle. It’s Magneto, he says, the T sharp and harsh. I won’t answer to my slave name, and you shouldn’t either. That name is another disguise, he says, like the unnatural skin you used to wear. You’d do well to remember that.

Except some days, the days you miss Charles, feel him like a phantom limb, tangible in its absence, you wonder exactly which name is the lie.

 For a while you entertain the possibility of going back-- not to stay, never to stay. But for all his missteps Charles will always be your brother, in more than just mutankind. But you know that can never be now. You must leave it all behind like your old skin. So you draw metaphorical lines.

Then and Now.

  
Here and Gone.

 

 

||

 

 

It starts like this:

She stares into Magneto’s eyes and he looks at her so seriously, his eyes at a low burn. No one’s ever looked at her like that before. And then, when with one attentive finger, he tucks her hair behind her ear she --

You do whatever he wants.

Erik isn’t the first one. That honor goes to Robbie McCall, in the Oxford flat, while Charles was in class, but Erik is the first one Raven has ever fucked while wearing her own skin. And while she’d always found sex enjoyable, she’d always been so afraid of what would happen if she slipped her shape in the heat of the moment that she could never let herself immerse in the experience. (It happened once, just for a second. Robbie's eyes had been blessedly closed). It feels different now, sharper, every sensation magnetic and intense. Like the other times she’d been experiencing it secondhand.

Magneto fucks the same way he does everything else; with single minded drive and passion. The young woman she still is inside can’t help but feel flattered and humbled by his attentions. That he chose her over Emma or Angel, who are arguably more sensual and experienced in matters of the flesh. But even in the privacy of their intimacy he always talks about the mutant she is, never the woman. As if her abilities are all there is to her, like they're the only way he can think to relate to her. He doesn’t ask about the marks on her body, doesn’t volunteer anything about the ones on his. It smarts, but she never mentions it. Eventually, she’ll come to realize Erik and Charles are two sides of the same coin. Both fixated on her mutation, unable to get past it and see the person that inhabits the skin, even if for entirely different reasons. For Charles and Erik, Raven-Mystique is a projection of the world they wish to influence; she will always be caught between them.

Time and time again Magneto comes to find pleasure in Mystique’s body, but he is not in love with her, and he never will be. Their coupling is no more than a way for him to reassure a connection to their mutual cause. And through their connection Mystique comes to understand a fundamental truth about Erik: for all his strength and bravery, he too craves validation.

 

In the heat of the moment, though, it’s easy to give into the fantasy, that you can fix him, give him the peace he craves, but then comes the after—he rolls over, looks at the ceiling and seems startled at your presence beside him because the girl he fucked is already gone. And he’s left with only you: his grieving partner. The consolation prize for all the things he can never have.

 

 

 

||

  
1963\. Bad year all around. So much death. It sticks to Mystique like a scab from a wound that won't heal. It starts with a string of disappearances The Brotherhood tracks back to Project Wideawake. They're always one step ahead, no matter how many meetings Mystique infiltrates. Magneto stews in his frustration and paranoia. Mystique just feels shallow. She will never become used to being too late. It's bad enough to plan ambushes and find bodies instead. It much worse when not even the bodies are left when their rescue parties arrive. She thinks of them often, those those lost mutants, wonders if anyone misses them. If they'd left behind mothers or daughters who didn't care about the extra gene in their code.

It all changes the morning of April 10 when General Major Edwin Partridge dies in his Dallas home. He'd been in the middle of breakfast when a bullet tore through his skull. The Major General is first on Magneto's hit list. He’d been forced out his position in the Army due to his prejudices. Now settled in Dallas, as a man of influence whose anti-mutant rhetoric grew louder each day. He had to go. But The Brotherhood had been underground in Arizona when the news came through the wire.

Magneto sends Mystique and a team to Dallas to investigate. Her first mission. She takes Tempest and Riptide with her. Azazel would continue to move between camps. A week after General Partridge's death the body of mutant dancer Arleen Adams is found outside the Carousel Club. A week after that, Mystique, disguised as a stripper, meets Jack Ruby and his gang of thugs. Scum of all them. But overflowing with information when plied with alcohol. Mystique and her team follow the threads, until, jackpot. She can't believe their luck. Project Wideawake is here in Dallas, planning a raid on an underground mutant cell called the Morlocks.

This should be the triumphant moment for the heroine of the story, were this a fairytale we were telling. But it’s only real life. And your life had never been fair. July 1963. Dallas, still, three months into your investigation and everything goes to hell. You were arrogant, full of yourself because the great Magneto was trusting you with a mission. So you found Project: Wideawake and you barged in on their ambush without thought of consequences, only to be ambushed yourself. You stood no chance. You should've waited for Magneto. You’ve should’ve planned better. Should’ve, should have, should’ve.

You were fighting off an agent when Riptide's brains splattered all over your face, and his body dropped to the ground with a sickening thud. You looked up just in time to see Tempest fall—her life snuffed mid-flight, her body landing with an unceremonious splat on the hard ground. Like a bug. You freeze. You don't know what to do. Because for all your strategies and backup plans, this was the one eventuality you never planned for. You think you should scream, or perhaps move at least. You are paralyzed, your lungs in a vice. For the first time in your life you think, I am going to die. But Azazel grabs your hand and you are gone in a cloud of smoke.

 

Magneto uses Riptide and Tempest's deaths to his advantage by turning them into martyrs. For a while it’s exactly the right fuel for their kind of fire. There is no time to mourn their sister and brother in arms, Magneto says, not until they avenge them. And so they attempt to do.

 

||

It’s the kid’s eyes that do it. He has crystalline blue eyes, so much like Charles’ and they stare up at you, lifeless and unblinking. Something inside you snaps and you are no longer in control of your actions. Mystique brings her fists down on the father’s face, over and over until he’s nothing but a bloody pulp. Your knees press into the man’s neck. It’d be so easy then, to bring your hands down, wrap them around his pathetic neck, finish it all. He deserves it, the disgusting human. He doesn’t get to live. You squeeze his neck and a spear comes flying through the air, impales itself on the man’s forehead. Mystique’s eyes flash with amber fury. I had that, you say and Magneto turns around, walks away.

There is a monster inside you, emerging and settling atop your skin. You can't explain it; it's a parasite feeding off all the good left in you, leaving behind a hunger, insatiable. Every time you close your eyes you see Tempest fall from the sky. You feel the sick warmth of Riptide's blood on your face. You don’t know how to stop being angry.

The Brotherhood’s death toll is impressive, but Mystique has no blood on her hands. You ask Azazel that night, how come Magneto never lets you kill anyone.  
  
“Murder splinters the soul so it cannot be put back together,” he says.

 

 

||

  
“Have you lost your mind?” Mystique says, incredulous. Across from her in the modest dining table of their current safehouse Magneto picks at his dinner like he didn’t just drop this bomb on her. “This isn’t why I gave you that intel.” She’s trying to sound firm, confident, but there is a strident plea in her tone that irritates her.

 

“What you intended me to do with it is irrelevant,” he says, fiercely, as if that justifies everything.

 

She can’t tell if it’s naivety or arrogance.

 

“You’re talking about the leader of the free world, Erik. Mutant or not, do you honestly think he’d give it all up for this?” She gestures to the humble hiding place they are in at the moment, so far removed from Sebastian Shaw’s showy mansions they first appropriated.

 

“He will if he knows what’s right.” He searches her face for something she can't give him. “I thought you understood that. An ally like that on our side, it would make us unstoppable.”

 

“So power, then. That's why you're doing it.”

 

 “And what exactly do you propose we do?”

 

“Maybe we should just let him die.”

 

“He's one--”

 

“One of us, yes. He's also the reason so many of us are dead. He may be one of us, but he is not with us.”

 

“War is coming, Mystique. I’ve been caught on the wrong side before. Never again.”

 

“Fuck your war. That’s not the point. We're not heroes, Erik. This isn't what we do. We calculate, we make plans, we strategize. We eliminate threats to our kind. You are seeing what you want to see. Take away the JFK factor. What's left? Project Wideawake, and their supposed research? They want a cure, for _them_. Your name is all over those files, Erik. They want your helmet. Why? Haven’t you thought they’re luring you in?”

 

He laughs, and it sounds like steel. Mystique knows she's lost the game.

 

“Angel and Janos are dead, Erik. Because of him. Because of me. Because of us. Because we were careless and over confident and we decided to go into a situation blind. And now you're saying you want to do it again? That information just fell into our laps. It’s too easy. This doesn’t feel right,” she presses.

 

 “Have you forgotten who trained _you_?”

 

She looks at the boards with all their organized chaos; the clippings, the photos, the plans. Magneto had always taught her to trust her instincts. Why can't he see it? Something caustic and sharp floods her mouth, something she thought she’d left behind. Fear. She wants what he wants, Mystique tells herself-- a safe future for mutants. That much is true. But the quest for power and dominance has never been her own. Up until that moment she’d ignored the widening water that worked between Magneto and the scant remains of The Brotherhood. She'd pretended not to see the way Emma rolled her eyes at his speeches, or how Azazel resented being Magneto’s errand boy. (His words, not Mystique’s). But in that moment, the divide between them yawns open and Mystique feels as if she’s straddling a chasm, desperately trying to hold onto both sides before it swallows her whole. And so she begs.

 

“Erik, please don't do this. If not for The Brotherhood, then for–” she stops herself.

 

“What? For you? Don't be absurd. This is not up for discussion,” Magneto says.“I suggest you get some rest. I will need you in top shape if I'm to be gone.”

 

Magneto stands. The helmet obscures his face. Mystique feels as if she’s looking at him for the first time. What does he see when he looks at her?

 

 

> _What am I to you? Your friend, your partner, your lover? Or am I just the sharpest tool in your arsenal?_
> 
>  

“Yes, sir.”

 

That thing you’re feeling now? It’s resignation.

 

 

Magneto comes to you that night and you make no objections. When you take him into your body it’s part apology (even though Magneto will never say the words), and part business transaction. The room is dark but a swath of moonlight cuts through the black and falls on Erik’s face as he moves above and inside you. You stare at his mouth with a fixation you can’t explain to yourself. You've been doing this for months but you can count on both hands how many times he’s kissed you. For the first time, it bothers you. Your eyes wander his face and fixate on his closed eyes. You will them to part, to look at you and see you, open and vulnerable, but they remain stubbornly closed. You call his name, the real one, and he hangs his head, rests his forehead on your shoulder. You’re not sure you want to do this anymore, but the familiar pull and energy of release begins climbing up your thighs, and your heels dig into the mattress, knees spreading instinctively, hips lift and twist, and you pant into the dark as it stalks forward, closer now still, and with a whine, it is over.

You feel a certain surrender settle, like the bodily heaviness after too much wine, and unlike the surrender of relief. For a moment you forget yourself, and you put your nose to Erik’s neck, and feel, for that moment, like a doe, or perhaps a lamb, safe, as in a restful dream.

 

After the sex, he sits up with his back to you and you coil up like a snake. You feel like a bad memory, something deep inside you ruined, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, a slithering, choking worry. You don’t try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it’s nothing after all, just everything filling up finally and absolutely with death. And you don’t even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it’s obviously your own damn fault. And you know things will never be the same again.

 

 

||

  
Erik leaves for Dallas on a Friday. He goes alone. That is his first mistake, but certainly not his only. Two days later, still in Arizona, Mystique and what's left of The Brotherhood watch in horror as the President of the United States, the mutant brother Magneto was supposed to save, falls dead by a bullet to the head. An arresting silence ensues. Mystique breathes through the storm welling up beneath her ribcage. She sees herself step out of her body to yell at the television screen:

 

> _Erik, you stupid fuck!,_ her voice raw, and feral.

  
There is no time to be emotional now. She walks away with purposeful strides, leaving the group to stare after her retreating figure.

The government and the media will get their scapegoat—the infamous Magneto, the world's most dangerous man, finally captured—but Mystique knows better. She locks herself in Magneto's study, surrounded by his smell, his things, his wall of plans. It’s all that is left of him for her to yell I told you so. She sees the mission disintegrate before her. All their hard work, all their progress, gone in a careless instant. These men-- mutants, are good, but followers, all of them, aimless without a leader. What would they do? She will do what must be done. Mystique and Magneto, they’re survivors. They go on. They don’t know how not to.

 

And you know what you need to do.

 

Mystique steps out of the room, all uncertainty left behind and gives the orders. They have to go to Dallas, they have to find Magneto before the government does. Azazel nods at her, holds out a hand, open, palm up. Emma takes Azazel’s other hand and Mystique readies herself for the pinching pull of teleportation.

 

Dallas is a clusterfuck. They search and search, but they don’t find Erik. Or they do, but it's too late; Magneto has already been detained and pumped full of tranquilizers. They hear of the underground prison, free of metal, and it almost sounds too fantastical and convenient but Mystique doesn't doubt it’s existence. The CIA has had it ready for him all this time.

 

Mystique could probably wear the right skin, Emma could tap into the right mind, Azazel could drop them into just the right place. They _could_. But in that moment, Mystique doesn't want to.

 

“Let him rot there,” she says. If he was too stupid to let himself get caught, let him rot. We don’t need him.

 

I don’t need him, is what you really mean.


	2. In the Maw

_"There's blood falling from my eyes,_  
_Because I've hated the fact that all the worst things in life_  
_Comes for free, it all comes for free_  
  
_We sometimes think we want to disappear_  
_When all we really want is to be found."_

\- Adna

* * *

 

The night they learn of Magneto’s capture Mystique fucks Azazel for the first time, in a dingy roadside motel outside of Dallas. It’s the tawdry kind of establishment with mood lighting, vibrating beds and mirrors, mirrors everywhere. Everywhere she looks she can them fucking each other like wild beasts, bodies flushed purple, grunting and groaning. She stares at her reflection, takes in the picture; he on his back, thighs spread wide, her knees sinking into the mattress and she struggles for purchase. She watches her face, marvels at the look of satisfaction there. Azazel turns and meets her gaze in the mirror. He smiles at her. She smiles back and drops her head to seize his mouth in a kiss, which he enthusiastically returns. She’d imagined his skin scorching to the touch, for some reason, but it’s not. He isn’t warmer than any other man she’s ever been with. There is a slight acrid smell that clings to his pores, though, something like gunpowder, but Mystique finds she likes it. It evokes in her a sense of power and other-worldliness. They look like monsters out of a children's book, but Azazel is the only person who has ever made Mystique feel normal. In a moment of dangerous candidness, she tells him this and he laughs. His tail coils around her torso, the tip at her throat. He could kill her so easily. The thought makes her body quiver. His sharp claws catch on the scales on her thighs as she rides him, and Mystique feels freer than she’s ever felt. To be beheld like that, it feels like fireworks.

 

The morning after: Azazel’s tail holds on to one of her legs, his left hand rests on her right breast. It occurs to her that for the first time in her life she can do whatever she wants. She doesn’t know what that is yet, but she knows what it's not.

 

“I don't want to go back to Arizona,” Mystique says. “Stay with me.”

 

“ _Da_ , I will stay.”

 

**||**

 

Madripoor, February 1965. Magneto is still rotting away a hundred stories underground. He was officially found guilty in a sham of a trial last year and you... you are drowning in money and the kind of luxury that is obscene. In the last year you've seen more of the world than you had seen in the decades you'd been alive before that. When you abandoned Magneto's mission you had felt no shame. You still don't. Years later, you will think back to this time and isolate it as the moment when you went wrong. When you can be anyone, and go anywhere at the speed of thought, life has a way of making you feel invincible. When you are living the moment you don’t see the things that start getting in the way. Azazel has led the life of a criminal and a mercenary for so long. It fits him like a well tailored suit. He takes you in now and you walk at his side as a true partner in every sense of the word. You think yourself a Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. If the poor is yourself. Life owes you.

 

“We are not the good guys, Mystique,” Azazel says. And you don’t know why it took you so long to accept this. Maybe it was easier to deny it when Magneto’s righteousness was driving you. But you chose to leave that and him behind. This is what you are now. A thief. A criminal. A terrorist. If the world already thinks you're a devil, might as well prove it right.

 

And then:

 

“You guys hear about Frost, from the Hellfire Club?”

 

Dead. Emma’s dead. You remember the last time you saw her, two months ago in Las Vegas, fitting in seamlessly into her old life as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club. Word on the street is government was involved. Some say she’d been a snitch for them before. That she knew too much, so they took care of it. But you know the truth. You’d been there and then you left to fuck Azazel halfway a world away, and you never liked Emma much, but she was still family and now she is dead and gone.

 

**||**

May 1965. Party’s over. Back to the house in Arizona, back to the dossiers and hit lists. They find it razed to the ground. All trace of their stay there gone. Why did Mystique expect any different? And it's back to work for both of them, back to moving in and out of people’s bodies and spaces. A month in Langley posing as a mousy secretary. Another month in DC as a senator's adviser. It's not what she hears that unsettles her unlike anything else; it's what she doesn't. No one’s talking. Project Wideawake is gone, but the fight isn’t over.

 

Half a world away the war intensifies and Mystique realizes just how many of her friends are missing. Brothers, sisters gone, as if they’d never existed. Something in them changes. It’s not about Magneto’s power trip anymore; it’s about survival. Something is hunting them. Someone. Suddenly Erik’s paranoia doesn’t seem so unfounded; someone is persecuting them, but at this moment it is too late to go back. Soldiers at war don’t have the benefit of nostalgia.

 

Mystique imagines the speeches Magneto might speak, but doesn’t make herself say them. They’re not for her. And she’s so tired. She doesn’t want to lead an army. She can’t even bring herself to go recruiting. She just wants to get the job done. For a while they do just that. The shape shifter and the teleporter. They’re not an army, but they’re enough. She wonders how long can she keep it up. How much longer the small victories will be enough. She's beginning to feel watered down.

 

Azazel still protects her soul by taking on the dirty work himself. Raven loves him from it. Mystique hates him. She knows the day will come when she will need to take a life. When it comes there won't be room for hesitation. There is no time to be wasted mourning the person she used to be; it only gets the way of who she needs to become.

 

They are all each other has now. Or rather, Azazel is the only one Raven has left. Everyone else is dead or in hiding. The two of them against the world. She understands, though, that out of the two of them, she is the lonely one. She clings to him like she clung to Charles once, afraid and so grateful she disgusts herself. She wants to cry because this wasn’t the way things were supposed to turn out, but she can’t bring herself to do it in front of Azazel. But it’s like he can read her mind, because he brings a hand to her face and caresses her eyelashes in a move so tender something inside her breaks open.

 

“There is no shame in being afraid,” Azazel tells her. He doesn’t speak much, when he does he always says the right thing. His insight always shocks her, although there shouldn’t be a reason for that. It’s easy to look at him and only see the mercenary with the face of the Devil, but he’s lived lifetimes, and no one stays around that long without being wise.

 

“Fear keeps you alive, Mystique,” he continues. “The day you are not afraid anymore, that is when you should worry."

 

“I find it hard to be believe you have ever felt fear,” she says.

 

His smile is a little sad, and a lot telling.

  
**||**

“I don’t know how old I am,” Mystique says one night. It is 1967 and they are in Lisbon, living large with the money Mystique swindled from a Swedish prince. Mystique swaddled in Russian furs. Azazel looks at her like he doesn’t see the problem.

 

“Neither do I,” he says. “I lost count several hundred years ago.”

 

Her mouth drops and she laughs, loud and raspy, surprised and delighted. It’s not until later she realizes it’s the first time she’s laughed like that since the week she spent training with Charles, Erik, and the rest of the mutants up in Westchester.

 

Being with Azazel is nothing like her affair with Erik. This feels real and permanent. Azazel makes her feel like a woman-- like a person, and not a weapon, or a means to an end. They speak of what is was like to grow up looking like they do. They talk about Azazel’s many lives. And for the first time in a long time Raven speaks Charles’ name. She tells Azazel about how he took her in, about the warring feelings she has. She was eight, or maybe ten, most likely twelve --don’t ask her to remember specifics-- and until Charles, she had never known love. But Charles’ love brought with it its own set of complications and repercussions. Charles had shown her love but also made her believe her mutation was something to be afraid of.  For the first time she speaks candidly about how she internalized his fears until they festered. She couldn’t help but resent him sometimes, the way he was so free to carelessly use his mutation without fear of retribution. It was an ugly feeling, yet inevitable. She thinks they were always headed there, to that moment of separation. She only wishes the circumstances had been better.

 

Azazel has no family to speak of, hasn’t had one for a long time. He can’t even remember them. She can’t imagine him as a child and that makes her feel sad.

 

Azazel’s body is a roadmap of marks; his history written on his body. There are burn marks all over his torso (villagers did that when he was a boy). Stars tattooed on his chest (Russian mob). There’s the scar across his eye. The story behind it surprisingly funny; a teleportation accident, he says. Raven chooses to believe him, even though she knows he’s probably lying. There’s a dagger tattooed on the inside of his right thigh. That one is Mystique’s favorite. The one she wonders about the most, though, is a carving on his left shoulder blade. They lie naked in bed and she traces the raised N with her index finger. “Neyaphem”, he says. His only explanation. His people.

 

**||**

 

She becomes aware of her pregnancy like waking up. One moment you’re not and then you are, the knowledge suddenly registering in her mind.

 

_I’m pregnant_ , she tells him and he says, okay.

 

It would probably be easier and safer to get rid of it,  but they never bring it up. They know what they have to do. They have to stop. They decide to lay low.

 

Azazel takes them to a safehouse in the middle of the Black Forest in Bavaria. He tells her he knows someone there, someone who could help them, when the time came. But even after she presses, he won’t say who. She tells herself it’s not hiding, it’s survival. When she puts it that way it doesn’t sound much different than what they’ve been doing for the past 5 years.

 

She wears the face of an olive-skinned woman with round cheeks and freckles when she goes into town for supplies and the old women in the village coo over her belly and give her advice for when the baby comes. In moments of weakness Raven allows herself to indulge in the fantasy. She accepts the hand knit blankets and tiny booties the village ladies give her. She even buys a cradle.

 

Here’s the thing: Raven doesn’t want to fight a war. She wants a life. And sometimes that life includes domesticity. She hadn’t realized how much she'd depended on momentum to keep herself from dwelling on the things she misses, like fluffy slippers, and eating popcorn at the cinema, dancing along to the radio. Hugs. All the things she might have done with Hank McCoy, if they’d been different people. And how different would things be if it were Hank’s baby she carried? 

 

Allowed all this idle time, Raven worries for her baby, what his life will be like. If he’ll ever play on monkey bars and go to school holding a tin lunch box and do homework and have sleepovers. A life on the run doesn’t sound conducive to any of it. Their son grows bigger insider her but they don’t ever talk about him in a future sense. Like he’s a real person instead of an ever expanding bump. They don’t talk much at all. She and Azazel exist in companionable silence, never awkward because it’s like they already know what the other would say.

 

“What do you think he’ll look like?” she asks one night when she’s feeling brave and optimistic.

 

Azazel shrugs and then gives her that smile that terrifies people but endears her.

 

“Colorful,” he says after a beat. “Maybe he will be purple.”

 

She laughs, and then goes serious again.

 

“I hope he has your eyes,” she says.

 

Azazel caresses her eyelashes, strokes her cheek, but he remains silent.

 

**||**

 

Living in the cabin with Azazel is the closest she’s even been to being in real love. Like adult love. She likes Azazel. And Azazel likes Mystique. He likes Raven, too.

 

It can’t last.

 

It happens quickly, too quickly. They come at night, like the cowards they are. One moment she and Azazel are alone in the safehouse, Raven’s asleep on her side, swallowed up by pillows to support the heavy weight of their unborn child. She is sound asleep, and this will haunt her forever. She doesn’t hear the footsteps surrounding the house. The one time her enhanced senses fail her.

 

She wakes only when she feels Azazel startle beside her and she sees them, mercenaries in black, bursting through the door, catching them off guard, their guns too quick for Azazel's reflexes. In the dark she sees his eyes bug out and his body sways. A tranquilizer dart protrudes from his neck. Raven looks up and time slows down. A soldier stands in front of her, mere feet away, with a gun pointed at her face. She sees the intruder's finger tighten on the trigger of the tranquilizer gun, she flinches and brings her hands to cover her stomach. She closes her eyes, screams and smoke fills her mouth.

 

They land unceremoniously in the middle of the forest, pulled down mid trip, and she cries out at the sharp pain that ripples through her lower back and across her pelvis. Azazel clutches his side where a knife hit its target. There is blood on his hands, slightly deeper than the red of his skin. _I'm sorry_ , he says, _I_ _'m sorry I couldn't get you farther_. She can’t understand. She rolls over, crawls to him, but another sharp pain knocks the breath out of her, and she sways there, on all fours in the middle of the forest floor.

 

Like a beast.

 

_This cannot be happening._

 

Azazel pauses only to take in his surroundings, hands pressed to the wound in his side, and makes a decision.

 

“Run east, Mystique. Run,” Azazel says.

 

“What? I can't. I’m not going to leave you,” She chokes the words out, the air is too thin, or maybe she’s forgotten how to breathe.

 

“I will find you after.”

 

“After what? Where are you going?”

 

“If I don’t take care of them now, they will find us again.”

 

He takes off his coat and lays it at her feet, finally he tosses her the bloody knife. They lock eyes for a moment. What she sees there terrifies her.

 

“Azazel, wait,” she cries out, and with a plume of dark smoke, he is gone.

 

“Don’t leave me.”

 

Wait. She waits. For long minutes she sits on the damp earth and Azazel isn’t back, so she runs, east like he said. She is aimless and the pain comes every few minutes. Each time more intense than before. Still she runs and then when the pain is too much she walks and walks through the forest until the contractions force her to stop. Her waters break. She feels herself deflate.

 

She takes off Azazel's coat and sits against a tree. The forest dark as a wolf’s mouth and just as a threatening, and Raven is alone and her son is fighting to be born.

 

For the first time in years, you reach out. _Charles?_ you call out, tentative, small. _Charles_! you call again, and again, until you’re crying and screaming, opening your mind with the same focus you used to shield it, praying for something, anything.

 

_Please, Charles. Please. I don’t know what to do._

 

But there is no answer, no invading warmth in your mind and you know this is what it feels like to be an island. Isle-solated. Breathe. Inhale. Contractions, stop, start, fuck, and you tuck your her legs underneath yourself, knees digging into the mossy earth and with a guttural groan you bear down. Raven’s son slips from your body and you feel yourself become a cave. You look at him; blue skinned, the impossibly soft down, pointy ears, the tail that curls around his tiny, tiny body. He’s the most beautiful thing you have ever touched but for exactly three seconds Raven despairs.

 

If only he looked…

 

No.

 

You don’t know how long you stare at the creature in your arms before you take Azazel’s knife, you cut the umbilical cord, severing connection. Blood seeps out, absorbs the earth around you. You stay there, back to the tree trunk, the mewling babe at your breast. You cry until the light shifts in the sky as the sun readies to rise. Azazel isn’t coming. We know that now.

 

The first rays of morning light peek through the thicket above and land on the baby’s face. His tiny features screw in protest. He mewls and the sound seems amplified. You startle awake. You look around you, but you’re still safe within the forest. The baby opens his eyes for the first time, and the sight of them, bright amber, just like yours, brings a new round of tears. You thought you’d exhausted them.

 

Mystique walks out of her hideout, limping but headstrong, naked as the day they were born, something inside her hollowed out. She cradles her infant to her naked breast, still swaddled in his father’s coat. He doesn’t cry. She understands with sudden clarity why Azazel never indulged in her fantasies of a family. He’d known then what she’s just beginning to comprehend now. They don’t get to keep him. People like them don’t get to have families.

 

She continues east, like Azazel instructed her, baby in the crook of one arm, the bloody blade firmly grasped in the other hand. She walks for what feels like hours until a break in the trees reveals a cabin, partially hidden. She raises the knife and perks her senses, but there seems to be no threat. It's then she sees it, the stylized N carved into the wood of the front door. ‘Neyaphem’, she whispers. For a small moment she allows herself to feel hope, that maybe Azazel… Stop it, Mystique.

 

A woman walks out of the cabin, almost as if she’s been waiting for them. You shift your shape, turn back into the freckled, cherubic woman you are known as here. But the woman's eyes are white, unseeing. Yet you feel like she’s peering right into your soul. You are frightened but your body is lead and you are not sure how much longer you can hold yourself up. You are a wound, seeping and pulsating.

 

The woman places a hand to her chest and says _Margaly_ , and you bring your own hand to your heart, Azazel's blade still fisted there, and you open your mouth but you don't know what to say, and something like a whimper escapes without license. Margaly points to the baby and you shake your head, even though you’re not sure she can see you. You can't name him, you refuse to see him as anything other collateral damage. A necessary sacrifice. The voice in your head sounds suspiciously like Erik.

 

You follow Margaly into the cabin. She draws you a bath, and for the first time you see the blood coating your thighs, the dirt that cakes your scales. The babe sleeps as you wash away all trace of childbirth. In your mind you being to craft your next step.

 

You wonder at the craziness of life. That could know pure love and unadulterated hate in the same instant. You look at your baby and commit his shape to memory. His face will eventually become a stranger's and he will never know what you are to him. Forgive me, Raven whispers into her baby’s ear, before laying him down in the stranger's arms, knowing she will never see him again. The last member of her family becomes one more casualty of this war none but a few know is being waged.

  
When the skies change from black to pale pink and orange, Mystique runs out of the Black Forest.  She vows, for Azazel, for her baby, and for herself, she will find whoever is responsible, and she will kill him.

 

* * *

 

 

 

In case of emergency, one must do the following:

 

Adopt a new identity. Change name, hair color, clothes. Don’t count on any luck. Count on _bad_ luck. Get gone. Disappear. Avoid airports. Travel by car if possible. Only carry cash. Don't call home. Don't say goodbye. In fact, don't talk to anyone. Destroy everything. Don't leave anything behind. But don't take anything. Burn every document, every photograph, every memento. Make it disappear and then disappear.

 

Here is the truth she never tells anyone. After Raven’s son is born Mystique spends a year in a borrowed bodies. Constantly seeing new faces, but forging no relationships that last or get more intimate. And so she comes full circle: the girl who could be anyone but only ever wanted to be herself now finds that self unbearable. Raven was expert at running away and so it seemed that the trait has passed on to Mystique. First, she tries on Linda, with auburn hair and knobby knees. In Prague she is Mariska, who likes to bake. In Argentina, Marta is an expert thief.

 

She practices looking normal, invisible. She hasn’t spoken more than ten words to anyone in six months. Her life becomes routine:  One more train ride, one more border crossing, one more motel room. Anonymous, cell-like, just like Magneto taught her. She sleeps with her back to the wall and Azazel’s knife fisted under her pillow. She never wears the same face twice. Every morning she stands in front of her current motel room’s dirty mirror and says the names aloud--

 

Tina

   Amy

        Natasha

                 Soraya

                         Siobhan

                                 

\-- just to ground herself in the real and the tangible.

 

You are losing your mind.

 

You begin to wonder how long you can keep it up. You feel diluted. You lost your name running in the rain and nobody knows who you are as you pass them by, cloaked in pink skin, dark skin, yellow skin. Sister. Lover. Mother. They are gone and there is only you. Angel, Janos, Emma, Erik, Azazel. They are gone and there is only you. Hank and Sean and Moira and Alex; they are gone and there is only you. Charles, he too is gone and there is only you.

 

Who are you?

 

You are a fiction. A narrative construct made up superimposed parts; a palimpsest of a person. Though some days you feel more like a cypher without a key. Your parts have been rearranged and you are not the same. Raven’s son is one year old today and you are a world away feeling sorry for yourself, caught up in the things you cannot change. How do you spool a life back together after the threads have been cut? You can't. You have to take the fibers and make something new. She had made herself new once. She could do it again. Snap out of it, Mystique, go back to work. Light a candle for your baby. Pray to a god you don't believe in life is treating him well.

 

**||**

 

There are things Mystique knows to be true:

 

  * In the year 1963 17 mutants went missing under suspicious circumstances. All courtesy of Project Wideawake. 
  * Project Wideawake had been created on the orders of President John F Kennedy. 
  * The very same president who came from a family of mutants. 
  * President Kennedy died November 1963. 
  * Magneto did not kill him. 
  * She's not sorry he's dead. 
  * Sometimes she wishes she'd been the one to pull the trigger. 
  * President Lyndon's presidency coincides with an increase of the draft. Thousands of soldiers deployed to Vietnam. 
  * Many of these soldiers are mutants. Mutants whose bodies don't come home. 



One question remains unanswered:

  1. Where do they go?



  


**||**

 

She has a moment of weakness, the morning Raven’s son turns two. She happens to be in Philadelphia, so she picks up the phone and calls the place she stills refers to as home, exactly 84 months after she left. The phone rings and rings and she thinks no one will answer, but then, a click, and breathy and urgent, Hank’s voice, saying, hello? Hello?

 

And she wants to say Hank, it’s me, but her mouth feels like it’s choking on ash and the words don’t come and he says, Raven is that you?

 

I don’t know is it you? What a strange question, Raven is that you.

 

**||**

 

Raven’s son turned three yesterday morning and Petty Officer Pembley is knee deep in the Vietnam mud, dirty and blood splattered. The blood is not his own, or her own, Mystique’s that is, but still Mystique didn’t put it there. Mystique still hasn’t killed even if she’s a soldier in a real war now. She’s saving the honor for the one responsible.

 

She holds Private Anderson's body in her bloody arms. He stares at her disguised face, so scared, so young. He will die soon. Another brother who won't ever get to go home again. Another soul she was too late to save. He stops shaking in her arms and his eyes go glassy. Watching someone die is the most intimate thing she has ever experienced. The gunfire continues around them. She still holds on to Anderson’s body. She vows revenge for him, too.

 

 

**||**

 

She fantasizes about killing all the time now. All the ways she could do it. A silent kill from afar, maybe. A clean shot to the head with a sniper rifle. Then her skin would ripple into falsehood and disappear once more and no one would ever have to know. Or perhaps up close and personal, so she could watch the life drain from his eyes after she'd dragged Azazel's knife from navel to sternum. Yes, that's how she'll do it, with Azazel's knife. She wants to experience his fear, his helplessness. She wants him to know her name. She wants to be looking right into his eyes when he realizes he will die.

She is finally free of fear.

 

**||**

 

January 27

Dear Raven,

1 7. One seven, January 27th, eleven years later. Nothing has changed we are at a standstill. I speak in other tongues now. Wear a different face. Foreign. All this time we have been away, but nothing has changed. We are at a standstill.

 

Here at my return eleven years later, the war is not ended. We fight the same war. We are inside the same struggle seeking the same destination.

 

There is good news, though. You have found him. After years running, hunted, searching, hunting. The prey falls in your trap. Soon you will see him face to face. He who has taken everything from us. The time will come soon, and when it does, don’t hesitate.

  
Don’t mourn for what used to be. It will only get in the way of what needs to be.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was somewhat inspired by some other works that deal with identity: "Eat the Document" by Dana Spiotta; "Lust" by Susan Minot; "Dictee" by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. There's also a line in there somewhere borrowed from 'The Metamorphosis'.


End file.
